…requires more than just good programming.

Tag Archives: brandon pearce

Tim Ferriss’ ‘Four Hour Work Week’ is a thought provoking, but controversial, book. One of the central ideas he promotes is that you should be able to use outsourcing to create a money making business (‘muse’) that you can run in only a few hours per week. Leaving you with enough free time and income to travel the world, learn to tango or otherwise amuse yourself. But I am highly sceptical that anyone can sustain, let alone grow, a software business long term, working only 4 hours per week. I have run my own business working less than 10 hours week for a month or two at a time while travelling or doing house renovations. But it only gave me enough time to keep things ticking over. I wasn’t able to improve my product or marketing. I am sure my business would decline in the face of technological changes and hungrier competitors if I kept this up for too long. I have spoken to other owners of small software businesses and they were of a similar opinion.

He says that after 5 years he is making $25k in sales per month with $10-12k in expenses per month[1] and no employees[2]. So that is a net profit of around $168k per year. That’s not too shabby, especially when you consider that he lives in Costa Rica and says he works just 5 hours per week. That’s nearly $650 per hour!

But he doesn’t say how many hours per week he worked to build the business. He also says in the case study:

With a complex web application, you can’t write it once and be done; you need to continue making enhancements and listen to user feedback in order to have a successful product.

I couldn’t see how this squared with working only 5 hours per week. Even if you are outsourcing everything you still need to manage the outsourcing, which can be time consuming in itself. I emailed him for some clarification and he was kind enough to give some more details:

It’s hard to give an average time worked over the past five years, since it’s changed so much. The first two years I was also working full-time as a programmer, but spent most of my free time working on the site – probably 10-20 hours per week. Once I quit my job (years 3-4) I worked probably 40 hours per week on the site. The past year or two, it varies from week to week. Some weeks I’ll only work 2 hours on it, some I’ll work more like 15, if I’m preparing for a new feature, special offer, or doing a big launch of some kind. But these days I’m averaging about 5 hours per week, and it’s been that way for well over a year.

Yes, I can definitely sustain and improve profit levels at this number of hours. The business is a well-oiled machine, and I have teams that are working to help continue to improve and grow the business in various ways, largely without my constant supervision. The business continues to grow every month, regardless of how much I work.

What do I spend these 5 hours doing? Mainly reviewing the new features or bug fixes the programmers have been working on, the requests from customers that the support team has submitted, and determining which items I want the programmers working on next. I also spend a little time handling some of the more difficult support or billing issues, paying my workers, managing a few PPC campaigns, answering e-mails, and checking stats. Recently, I’ve also been writing the scripts for some new video tutorials, and finding people to help produce the videos, too.

So, pretty much everything I do at this point could also be outsourced, allowing me to work even less, but at this point, I still enjoy this work, and it allows me to keep some important aspect of control on the business. Some day I may decide to work even less, but I’m pretty happy with 5 hours at the moment. :)

So, unsurprisingly, it took a lot more than 5 hours per week to reach this point. And only time will tell whether he can continue to maintain (let alone grow) this business with such minimal input. It will be an impressive achievement if he can. But I think Brandon is the exception rather than the rule. Perhaps he is particularly talented or lucky. Very few of the successful software business owners I know work short hours for extended periods. Also I have no way to verify Brandon’s numbers. So I would recommend viewing Brandon’s case study as something to aspire to, rather than a likely outcome.

Brandon has a blog and is writing a book about his experiences creating MusicTeachersHelper.com “in the hopes that it will help others who want to do something similar”. It should be an interesting read. Given all the spare time he has it shouldn’t take him long to finish it!